Excerpt from
Statement of  
J. Read Smith, President
National Association of Conservation Districts (NACD)

Relative to Conservation Programs Administered by the 
U.S. Department of Agriculture

Presented to the 
Subcommittee on Conservation, Credit, Rural Development and Research
Committee on Agriculture
U.S. House of Representatives

June 6, 2001

  Excerpts from: 
NACD Press Release | Read Smith Testimony

Excerpt from NACD Press Release

June 06, 2001

NACD Shares New Vision for Private Lands Conservation in America
Focus is on Incentive-Based Programs Managed at the Local Level

Washington, DC - National Association of Conservation Districts President J. Read Smith today called for the federal government to embrace a new approach to protecting natural resources on America's private working lands. Speaking on behalf of the nation's 3,000 conservations districts, Smith told the House Agriculture subcommittee on conservation, credit, rural development and research that voluntary, incentive-based initiatives offer the solution to helping the nation achieve its environmental goals.

A two-year study by NACD's national Farm Bill Task Force, comprised of producers, federal, state and local conservation agencies and organizations and private industry, concluded that today's agricultural conservation programs serve only a small percentage of our working lands and are under funded and not well coordinated. "From virtually everyone we talked to, the message was loud and clear that new incentives are needed to encourage producers to put conservation practices on the land - practices that not only benefit their farms and ranches, but also produce important public benefits such as better soil, cleaner water and air and enhanced fish and wildlife habitat," Smith stated ...

for the balance of this press release, go to http://www.nacdnet.org/newsreleases/fbhearing060601.htm

Excerpt from J. Read Smith Testimony

Note: Text in blue has been added for emphasis and to highlight statements that support the Resource Conservation Agreement concept.

Mr. Chairman and members of the subcommittee, I am J. Read Smith, a farmer from St. John, Washington and a conservation district supervisor from the Palouse Rock Lake Conservation District Board. Along with my wife and son, we run a small-grain farm and ranching operation in the Palouse Region of eastern Washington. I am President of the National Association of Conservation Districts and I appreciate your invitation to be here today to share conservation districts' recommendations on conservation programs administered by the US Department of Agriculture.

The National Association of Conservation Districts - NACD - is the nonprofit organization that represents the nation's 3,000 conservation districts and 17,000 men and women - district officials - who serve on their governing boards. Conservation districts are local units of government established under state law to carry out natural resource management programs at the local level. Currently, conservation districts work with NRCS and others to provide technical and other assistance to more than two-and-half million cooperating landowners and operators to help them manage and protect their land and water resources. Conservation districts encompass roughly 98 percent of the private lands in the United States.

I am here today to represent the views of those 17,000 conservation district officials. But more than that, as locally elected or appointed public officials, collectively we represent the American public; all of the constituents in the districts we serve. As we talk today about USDA's conservation programs and the next Farm Bill, I urge you to keep in mind that we are the people who work at the very point where the programs you authorize are delivered to the customer.

Mr. Chairman, I will focus my remarks today on a new vision conservation districts have for private lands conservation in America ...

I. A New Vision of Conservation

The private working lands that comprise America's farms, forests and ranches represent 70 percent of our nation's land - nearly 1.5 billion acres. That working land provides us not only with food and fiber for our own use, but with an array of exportable goods as well. It provides an economic engine and a tax base for rural communities and nearby cities.

But private lands also provide us with many intangible benefits. For example:

• Nearly 90 percent of the rain and snow that recharges our water supply falls on private land.
• About half of the nation's endangered species rely on private land for at least 80 percent of their habitat.
• Private lands are the vital bridges among public refuges, the links that prevent wildlife communities from becoming isolated from each other, threatening biodiversity.
• Many of our open space and scenic vistas are on private lands.
• Private lands are important in sequestering carbon and producing bioenergy products.

In setting the tone for the next Farm Bill, Congress has a new opportunity to elevate the importance of private lands conservation by creating incentives to better manage and protect those lands. We believe that expanded, voluntary, locally led and incentives-based initiatives will be the solution to helping America achieve its environmental goals.

Two years ago, we at NACD established a task force to examine how the Farm Bill conservation programs are working so far and look at what is needed to elevate and expand conservation in this country beyond what we're now doing. This task force included a former chief of the Natural Resources Conservation Service, the president of a major land-grant university and farmers, ranchers, district officials and district employees, representatives from state conservation agencies and from private industry.

Our task force began its work by developing a set of guiding principles, both simple and straightforward, to help crystallize our vision of what is needed to strengthen private lands conservation in America. We believe these principles should be the foundation upon which to refine and expand our federal, state, local and private conservation efforts. These principles are:

• Maintain a voluntary, incentive-driven approach to help private landowners and managers protect their soil, water, wildlife and related resources.
• Increase local leadership and involvement in carrying out programs, setting priorities, developing policies and advocating natural resource conservation and management.
• Utilize science-based technology in making conservation decisions, including those for accountability and baseline establishment.
• Provide land managers with the technical assistance they need to achieve conservation objectives.
• Emphasize the value of cost-effective conservation practices that, for all Americans, enhance quality of life, restore air and watershed health, and contribute to safe and affordable food and fiber.

In formulating our recommendations, the task force reached out to every conservation district in the nation for input on how our conservation programs are working now and what the workload needs are. We asked for suggestions for improving current programs and for new ideas to advance the nation's agenda for conservation. More than 1,700 conservation districts offered suggestions, ranging from modifications to the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) to the need for our conservation agenda to reach all communities and watersheds, not just a few targeted areas or producers.

We also contacted a wide cross-section of organizations with an interest in conservation to get their suggestions and comments. Fifty organizations responded, many with key suggestions and ideas on how we can work together to strengthen America's conservation agenda. Several of the organizations we have worked with have testified or will testify before this committee. We were encouraged to find that more than a few entertained thoughts similar to ours and we have incorporated many of their ideas into our recommendations. Our working paper, which is posted on NACD's web site, (www.nacdnet.org) invites input from anyone who is interested.

The people we surveyed as well as those we talked to at conferences and meetings, in private conversations, through postal mail and email all shared a common commitment to the cause of natural resources conservation on private lands. They also shared a common message, and the more we listened, the more similar the message sounded.

The State of the Land

Since the Farm Bill conservation title was enacted in 1985, we've made a lot of progress in reducing soil erosion and increasing productivity. Many of the gains we've made have been the result of conservation compliance, the adoption of conservation tillage, and farmer and rancher participation in the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), Wetlands Reserve Program (WRP), Wildlife Habitat Incentives Program (WHIP) and EQIP. Since 1996, however, the gains have slowed.

Data from the Conservation Technology Information Center (CTIC) show that in 2000, about 37 percent of the cropland in the U.S. used some form of conservation tillage. Although this is a substantial increase from the early 1980s when it first became popular, the rate of growth in this practice has slowed in recent years. To achieve CTIC's national goal of having 60 percent of all crop acres under some form of conservation tillage by 2005, we must increase its adoption substantially over the next four years.

Reports such as NRCS's National Resources Inventory, EPA's latest 305(b) Report to Congress, the Fish and Wildlife Service's (FWS) Status and Trends of Wetlands in the Coterminous United States 1986 to 1997 also tell us that progress has leveled off and that we still have a long way to go in meeting the nation's conservation goals.

A snapshot tells us that:

• According to EPA, more than 300,000 miles of rivers and streams and nearly 8 million acres of lakes are impaired with sediment, nutrients and microorganisms.
• America's private landowners have planted more than one million miles of buffer strips to protect the nation's rivers and streams. Meeting the ambitious goal of two million miles of buffers will hinge upon expanding voluntary conservation incentive programs.
• Wetlands losses have fallen by 80 percent since 1986, due largely to the Farm Bill's wetlands conservation provision and Wetlands Reserve Program. But, sometime this year, the program will reach its acreage limit.
• Runoff from concentrated animal feeding operations is becoming an increasing concern. An estimated 272,000 animal feeding operations need technical assistance to develop sound environmental operating plans over the next 10 years.
• As much as 60 percent of the nation's rangeland and 46 percent of permanent pasture are deteriorating.
• Roughly 2,200 aging flood control dams around the nation need to be rehabilitated or decommissioned at an estimated cost as high as $540 million.
• Every year since 1992, an average of 2.2 million acres of farmland have been lost to development.
• Although wind and water erosion was reduced by more than 30 percent on private rural lands, we are still losing an estimated 1.9 billion tons of topsoil to erosion on cropland every year.

Using existing programs and their own resources, owners of America's working lands have made significant strides in safeguarding the quality of our water, soil and air. But there's still a long way to go.

The State of Our Programs and Conservation Delivery System

The number of programs addressing private lands conservation has grown considerably over the past 20 years. That may sound like good news, but the fact is, rather than devoting more resources to more programs, we have sliced a shrinking pie into smaller pieces. This proliferation of programs has resulted in efforts that are not well coordinated and sometimes even operating at cross-purposes. Further, each of these programs comes with its own set of priorities, rules and limitations.

While the federal funding devoted to private lands conservation has been going down - in real dollars, the amount is about half of what it was in the mid-1930s - state and local governments have dramatically increased their investments in conservation. Their contributions to private lands conservation have gone from virtually nothing 70 years ago to nearly a billion-and-a-half dollars today, with conservation districts fielding the same level of field staff as NRCS. But, the situation is mixed. In some regions of the country there is a true increase in funding and staffing; in others state and local level funding has leveled off or is in decline.

States have also created additional programs to address nonpoint source pollution, runoff from animal feeding operations, wildlife habitat and other resource issues. In fact, some 38 states have developed cost-share programs with about $500 million dollars, more than matching the federal effort.

While these state and local initiatives have helped, they have added to the already complex array of programs and are themselves not well coordinated with federal conservation efforts. Many producers today find themselves struggling with multiple sets of rules and requirements, filling out application after application - sometimes for naught.

A major shortcoming of all these programs is their limited reach and lack of adequate funding. Many producers who are targeted by these programs find themselves turned away because of lack of resources for NRCS to provide the assistance they need. Through fiscal year 2000, for example, of the 299,213 producers who applied for assistance through WRP, EQIP, WHIP and the Farmland Protection Program, 208,083 - 70 percent - were turned away. There is a critical need to reach out to more producers and to get conservation on much more of the landscape.

To sum it all up, the state of our programs today is that they are too complicated, not well coordinated, oversubscribed, under funded and serve only a small percentage of our working lands.

Our delivery system to get these services to producers is the envy of many. It touches producers at the local level, helping them find cost-effective and innovative solutions to resource issues. However, it is straining under the weight of these many programs and the limited funding available to implement them. The fact is that the increase in state and local efforts cannot even come close to making up for the shrinking federal effort - both need to be expanded significantly.

Consider the following workload information.

Two years ago, NACD and several of its partners collected extensive data on the challenges facing private lands conservation through its National Field Workload Analysis (WLA). The purpose of that analysis was to examine the staff years of technical support needed at the field level to carry out 29 core work elements each year. Most of these core work elements encompass Farm Bill program objectives.

The national data collected through the WLA painted a stunning portrait of the private lands workload needs across the countryside. To effectively address the total resource needs on America's private lands would require 359,734 staff years of technical assistance from all sources. If stretched over a 10-year period, this would equate to 35,974 staff years per year, at a cost of nearly $2.4 billion per year for technical assistance alone. We are just now completing a 2001 WLA and early indications are that the need has not gone down but has increased by 15 percent.

Clearly, increased investments in technical assistance will be necessary to get the conservation job done in this country.

The Path Forward

Based on the work of our task force, the results of the Workload Analysis Survey and other studies, what we heard from our partners and, most importantly, what we heard from producers and district officials, America's conservation districts believe the federal government needs to embrace a new approach to conservation on private working lands. Rather than creating program after program, each designed to focus on one element of the resource base, we need to adopt an approach that concentrates on the entire landscape and the needs of producers. The focal point of this new way of doing business should be the producer's conservation plan, each one tailored to meet the specific needs of each individual operation. The bottom line for our new approach to conservation is: Conservation plans should drive programs, not the reverse.

Producers don't need the added headaches of having to choose from a limited set of program options in a vacuum. A better way would be to help them determine what is needed for their operations and then let local decision-makers recommend what program or programs are best suited to their conservation plan.

We believe this approach would provide much greater flexibility in decision-making at the local level. Such a shift would allow us to focus on getting conservation on the ground, not on "implementing programs." It also would allow us to better coordinate the existing tools in our conservation tool chest.

From virtually everyone we talked to, the message was loud and clear that a new incentives program is also needed to encourage producers to implement conservation practices. Practices that not only benefit their operations, but also produce important public benefits such as better soil, cleaner water, cleaner air and more fish and wildlife habitat. A new incentives program, fully funded and available to all producers, is needed to encourage conservation on more of the landscape. We envision rewarding at various levels producers who apply and maintain conservation practices, depending upon the extent and complexity of the conservation systems they install and/or maintain. The concept is very straightforward: The more conservation a producer puts on the land, the higher the incentive payment the producer receives.

We also envision a different option for implementing this new approach. Rather than implementing this concept exclusively through the traditional federal approach, we think states that have the capacity and the interest should be given a greater role and have the option of implementing it themselves, in cooperation with NRCS. As I mentioned earlier, state and local governments have strengthened their capacity significantly in the past several decades and many now have the capacity to be the driving force behind the implementation of this new federal-state-local-private paradigm.

We believe the benefits of a new incentives program and a greater state and local role in its implementation would be tremendous. It would be cost-effective and provide needed coordination among current and future conservation initiatives. It also would leverage even more state, local and private sector investment in private lands conservation.

This new paradigm also would bring more control back to the local level where decisions could be made by those who know what is needed and what works best. However, we recognize that there still would be a need for federal oversight and review.

By calling for this new agenda, we're not suggesting that we throw out existing programs; we need those to complement what we're proposing. In fact, we strongly support better funding and broader application of the existing USDA conservation programs to help producers get the conservation on the land they need to qualify for the new incentives and to meet the requirements of new and growing environmental regulations.

In shifting the focus of our delivery system, we also ardently support enhancing and elevating the priority of USDA's natural resources and environment mission. We believe that the Natural Resources Conservation Service must be maintained as a stand-alone agency and should have the responsibility for carrying out all of USDA's non-forestry environment and natural resources programs, including both technical and financial assistance components.

NRCS should also continue its role in providing technical and financial assistance for the current Farm Bill and other USDA conservation programs. The agency's role in providing leadership and guidance for national programs, as well as maintaining a national system of technical standards and guidelines, should be strengthened.

Private working lands forestry programs also should be strengthened and continue to be carried out through the Forest Service's State and Private Forestry programs. Targeted toward 44 percent of America's forestlands, these important programs are implemented in cooperation with state forestry agencies and usually involve conservation districts. They provide technical and other help the nation's nearly 10 million nonindustrial private forestland owners need to plan and apply complex conservation treatments.

And where do the traditional commodity programs fit in this mix? We are by no means suggesting that our new approach supplant all traditional farm support programs. Although changes may be needed in that arena, too, producers need these programs to compete in world markets. We believe that incentives for producers to provide conservation and environmental benefits from private working lands would complement those programs and could become an important component in future farm policy. In the context of today's chaotic agricultural economy and globalization of trade, it makes sense for conservation to be part of agriculture's economic, as well as environmental agenda.

Projected Benefits

By reaching far more producers, by providing for more local control and by delivering conservation assistance effectively and efficiently, we believe our new model would provide much greater benefits across the landscape than current, top-down and highly targeted programs. The investment required for this vision will be significant - we estimated a fully functioning incentives program alone could cost up to $8 billion annually. But we need to keep in mind that preventing resource problems now is far less costly than solving them later. We also need to keep in mind the return we'll get on that investment:

• better soil;
• cleaner water;
• greater profits; and
• a brighter future.

Even beyond these, we believe that better managing and enhancing our private working lands will result in more abundant wildlife, higher quality woodlands and wetlands, clearer air, safe and affordable food and fiber and an enhanced quality of life for all Americans ...

For the balance of this testimony, go to
http://www.nacdnet.org/govtaff/testimony/fbtestimony.htm

For further information on the Resource Conservation Agreement, please visit the following links: